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I guess I'll add more bloat to the forums and make a thread just for talking about mapmaking.

I don't have a lot to talk about at the moment, although I'll make a big post talking about my processes (creative and technical) sometime soon. Regardless, I recently decided to just do a from-the-ground-up redraw of my big map of Ideth in Photoshop. This way I can make everything super clean and pretty and edit absolutely anything I want to whenever I want. Want to change a city's name? Bam. Want to change the art style of the mountains or forests? Bam. Here's what I've got so far. First, the linework I've done so far on top of the rough stuff, and then the lines by themselves. BONUS: This is the first time ever Ideth has been complete, with Rutil included.





Also, here's a preview of the brush I'm probably going to use to create an attractive water border. Might try to make the lines thinner.



And, of course, I am thinking of the bigger picture here. Baby steps, though. Baby steps.

Oh yeah, raw Ideth (sans Rutil) for reference.

Update! Posts of substance coming soon (tm).

I THINK I have the forests down.


Here's what I did:
First, I hand-drew a seamless pattern for the forest.

To do this, all I did was create a new 1"x1", 600 dpi document and started drawing from the middle out. Then, when I had a good little bubble in the middle, I did Filter > Other > Offset and used the settings below. (HAS to be Wrap Around!)

This scooted my drawing 150 pixels to the right and down, and if it clipped the edge it wrapped it around. So you scoot it, fill some of the middle area without getting close to the edges, and scoot it again, over and over until it's completely full. Bada-boom. Edit > Define Pattern... done.
Then, I created a new Pattern Fill Layer (you click on the little half-black, half-white circle underneath the layer window) and hit Pattern. Bam, a layer filled with my forest. I scaled it down to be appropriate. And lastly, a Fill Layer comes it a mask already. So I inverted that mask, which let me "paint in" the forests with a white brush! The only real work I have to do is dodging things I need to and cleaning up the border (which is a lot of work, mind you.)

(See the middle-right for an example of my just brushing a little area in.)

SO YEAH.
PROGRESS.

Wow.
This is really cool.

Well, I heeded Hunter's advice and was able to complete my wave border in ten seconds.

First, I made another seamless pattern using the brush that I already had made and the technique that I used for the forest pattern.



Then, I selected my land (I have a layer with the land filled in solid blue for convenience, so I highlighted that layer and just selected by color range), did Select > Modify > Expand and grew it by 40 pixels, and then Select > Modify > Feather and feathered it by 10 pixels. After that, I selected the layer I wanted the border to be on, Edit > Fill > Pattern. Boom. Went back to the filled-land layer to grab a clean selection of that, then back to the actual border's layer, Delete, done. Here's what it looks like!



Here's a closeup.



SLOWLY MOVING ALONG!

So we've moved on to a new way of making forests. The above method is really cool, and fast, but it isn't clean enough. So now, we have this:



Basically I just set a brush to jitter size and direction and stamp every circle in by hand. It's really the only way these things are going to work, and it makes the borders for text look good. It makes it look like every single circle was placed intentionally, because they fucking are. Also the smudgeiness is just a drop shadow I added in, just trying to make it look more interesting.

But yeah, that forest took me 20 minutes and it might be a fiftieth of what I have to do (that's probably a really shitty guess).

Done, you giant sacks of shit.

Kind of. Some names and visuals pending.

Holy shit, that last screenshot has Vent in it.

Also nice map, my dude.